Alice Notley Receives the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Alice Notley

The Academy of American Poets announced this month that Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 will receive the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year.

"These poems give us thirty-five years of political, personal, death-defying engagement," judge Marie Ponsot remarked. "The nature Notley most loves is human nature. That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art. Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use. Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success."

Notley's prolific work includes Disobedience (2001), winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Mysteries of Small Houses (1998); The Descent of Alette (1996); Close to me & Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère (1995) She received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the the Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa in 1969.